“What are you thinking?” I ask.
“This sucks.”
“It does suck. I wanted to roast marshmallows on a fire.” Ollie pouts.
“Yeah I did too. No way the rain’s gonna let up though.”
Ollie sighs. We were supposed to be camping right now, but the “drizzle” we anticipated had become a downpour so we were stuck in a seedy motel for the evening.
“Well, at least we can have sex in a real bed,” I say.
Ollie looks at me. “Ok, normally I would totally be about that, but I am also disappointed I didn’t get to have sex in a tent.”
“Well I don’t think there’s room to set up a tent in here, but we can build a blanket fort, put the sleeping bag pads down and have sex on those if you want?”
He smiles. “You want to build a blanket fort? Really?”
“We can call it motel camping,” I suggest. “And there’s an over-hang outside our motel door. We can totally get the propane stove going to make dinner, or at least, make cocoa you can drink out your of favorite camping mug. We can play Uno in our tent, knock the whole thing over having sex, make dinner, and then we can watch a movie and cuddle in all the blankets.”
Ollie points a finger at me. “Sold.”
We salvage a ruin trip in a spree of juvenile joy. By the time the sun goes down, we were splayed in our half-collapsed blanket fort basking in the afterglow of good sex while we listen to the rain hit the windows. We take advantage of having an actual shower to clean up, and then we make dinner on our “porch”. Turns out we aren’t the only ones who got rained out from the campground, and two other groups join us in making the most random mishmash of dinner out of food that would have otherwise spoiled. We pass plates and ketchup and bottles of alcohol and cups of soda up and down the narrow cement strip in front of our motel units, laughing and joking over how silly this all is.
Eventually someone from the motel comes over to see what the smell is, and we give him a burger and he let us be.
When it gets late, the rain comes down even harder. We clean up, put everything away, and settle into bed in a nest of blankets to watch a movie on TV. Ollie finishes his cocoa but is half asleep by this point, cuddling me as he starts to doze off against my shoulder.
“Today was pretty fun after all,” he murmurs.
“It was. But anytime I’m with you is a good day.”
Ollie smiles. “I love you,” he whispers.
I blush and feel hot at the impact of his words. It’s the first time he’s said it to me. “I love you too,” I reply. Any hint of sleepiness I had is now gone. I sit there for almost another hour while Ollie sleeps in my arms, wondering how I got so lucky that it rained today.
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Captions are fictional.